The beauty of my body is not measured by the size of the clothes it can fit into, but by the stories that it tells. I have a belly and hips that say, "We grew a child in here," and breasts that say, "We nourished life." My hands, with bitten nails and a writer's callus, say, "We create amazing things."

I really don't think I need buns of steel. I'd be happy with buns of cinnamon. ~Ellen DeGeneres

Saturday, November 19, 1983

"One Nuclear Bomb can Ruin your Whole day!"

Dr Helen Caldicott, a pediatrician from Melbourne, Australia, has a deep emotional
concern for the well being of children and adults alike with hope towards
world-wide peace for all. With a tremendous strength born from
within, she gives anti-nuclear talks, getting her messages across with realistic
descriptions of the painful effects of nuclear war.

Memorized Public Address "One Nuclear Bomb can Ruin your Whole
day!"

The Speech...
At
8:15 one August morning, thirty -seven years ago, the doomsday clock struck
midnight. To end the World War II, the United States dropped the first
atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan The city was destroyed. The bomb
killed over 75,000 and injured nearly 100,000 of the 245, 000 residents.'A
repeat is not so far-fetched. Disaster struck once and it could
strike again, accept instead of a limited nuclear attack chances are very
likely it would be all-out nuclear war. Today the United States and
the Soviet Union have the equivalent of one million Hiroshima bombs
or four tons of T-N-T for every man, woman and child on the planet.

The
notion of limited and protracted wars are dangerous illusions. It
is more realistic for us to acknowledge that any nuclear exchange would
escalate immediately to all-out nuclear war destroying both countries
completely.

With the Reagan administration's declaration of a
'winnable' or 'limited' nuclear war as possibilities one can only see the
dangers inherent in countering the basic tenants of deterrence strategy;
i.e., the non-use of nuclear war is 'inconceivable to me --
madness. I have never read any study suggesting that any nuclear
war could be limited,' he said."

If a 'limited' or 'winnable' nuclear war could be fought it is extremely
important to ask the question; what are the standards or determinants of
limited or winnable? It is disheartening to note that our current
policy of nuclear deterrence or the balance of terror has lead to the
war-fighting strategy which states that the United States could survive
the loss of 20 million people. As Colin Gray, a consultant to the
State and Defense Departments has noted:

The current debate is not about the desirability of
nuclear war. It is about the best means of deterring
war. I believe in damage-limitation and in a war-fighting
strategy. That requires--in addition to appropriate offensive
forces--air defense, missile defense and civil defense. If
American casualties could, by these methods, be held to 20 million,
that would be very horrible, but it is damage from which we could
recover. This posture would make the Soviets take our
deterrence more seriously. '

The question concern is whether the American people are ready to die
20 million deep to preserve 'Peace and National Security?' With
respect to the notion of civil-defense in the event of a nuclear war I
can only refer to a defense department spokesman who told the American
people to, 'dig a hold, cover it with a couple of doors, and then throw
three feet of dirt on top. Everyone's going to make it if there are
enough shovels to go around.' Really? It's quite clear that civil
defense is absurd as was pointed out in the film: The Last
Great Epidemic, The Medical Consequences of Nuclear War, put out
by Physicians for Social Responsibility. Indeed as Schell notes,
'the policy of deterrence does not contemplate doing anything in defense
of the homeland...' This premise follows from the basic logic
of deterrence, which is that safety is 'the sturdy child of
terror.' As Schell notes, 'according to this logic, the safety can
only be as great as the terror is, and the terror therefore has to be
kept relentless.' Everyone must realize that medical 'disaster
planning' is meaningless. There is no possible effective medical
response. Most hospitals would be destroyed, medical personnel
would be dead or injured, supplies would be unavailable. Most
'survivors' would die.

The cancer incident rate from Hiroshima is still
rising, 37 years later. These bombs don't just kill people
suddenly. The go on killing people forever, but we've learned
nothing from that. In fact we have become a society that's hooked
on nuclear weapons like a drug. We're paying for it with our taxes
and we may ultimately pay for it with our lives!

But there is hope. Not
everyone is ready for the potential destruction of nuclear war and human
holocaust. There is a shining light.
Dr Helen Caldicott, a pediatrician from Melbourne, Australia, has a deep emotional
concern for the well being of children and adults alsike with hope towards
world-wide peace for all. With a tremendous strength born from
within, she gives anti-nuclear talks, getting her messages across with realistic
descriptions of the painful effects of nuclear war.

In the early 1970's
children were drinking radioactive water, contaminated by French Nuclear
weapon's testing and dieing of cancer and Leukemia, as a concerned
pediatrician she alerted the people as to what was happening and single
handedly took the French to court and forced them to stop the bomb
testing. Triumphantly she made the difference, creating a somewhat
safer environment for us to live in.

She moved to Boston and
organized and became president of Physicians for Social Responsibility.
1982 brought about her highest honor bestowed so far, she was awarded the
Humanist of the Year. Not one person alive today has
contributed more to our society on the hopes of freeing our world from
the fear of nuclear war than Dr. Caldicott. She would have agreed
with the insightful words of Winston Churchill when he said: "The
stone age may return upon the gleaming wings of Science and what might no
shower immeasurable blessings upon mankind may bring about his total destruction.
Beware I say, Time may be short."

Until I
realized that the earth was threatened by nuclear war, I really
wasn't very motivated. But now I feel that we should and must have
an influence.

We are into changing the whole psychology of the human
race. This isn't just to get rid of nuclear weapons, this is to
make human kind understand that they can't fight anymore.

We can't have
anymore wars until we get rid of our nuclear weapons or we will destroy
our world. War now is not war, it is annilation.

Lets describe
Nuclear war, so that you understand what we are talking about.
Every town and city with a population larger than 10,000 in this country
and the Soviet Union and Europe is targeted with at least one bomb.

Nuclear
war between Russia and America will take about half an hour to an hour to
complete. So we are not going to have much time to prepare for
it. But the Civil Defense is planning for us to relocate from risk
areas to host areas out in the country. It takes eight days to evacuate
cities but they say not to worry.

The failure of deterrence means
mutual annihilation. A single megaton weapon detonated over a
major U.S. City would kill 500,000 and create total causalities of over
750,000. In a full scale nuclear war in excess of 100 million
Russians and a comparable number of Americans would be killed outright,
and at least another 50 million in each country would die of injuries.

It
is apparent that the only solution to this holocaust and the apparent
serious limitations of deterrence policy is total unilateral nuclear
disarmament.

A twenty-megaton bomb dropped at ground level will burn
with the heat of the sun. Digging a hole three quarters of a mile
wide and 800 feet deep, converting all the buildings, all of us and all
the land below to radioactive fallout molecules.

Every person would be
killed, many actually vaporized. We could never do that before
nuclear weapons; vaporize people. The body is made up mostly of
water and when exposed to the heat of the sun, we turn to gas.
We've already done it. There are pictures and photographs of
shadows of people from Hiroshima.

So what else happens? Ear drums
rupture. If you look at the flash your eyes might disintegrate and
melt. The burns will be so very severe. Tens to hundreds of
thousands of people will be shockingly burned.

Out to a radius of
twenty-six miles, if you are just walking along your clothes would
instantaneously ignite and you'd become a flaming torch.

If you go to a
fall-out shelter the firestorm sucks the oxygen out and you die of
asphyxiation. The heat and the blast convert the fall-out shelters
to crematories.

So what will the long term effects on the world?
Well of course those few poor people, staggering around in the ruins will
have to wait in their fall-out shelters for two months. Because the
radiation fall-out is so severe, it will cause vomiting, hair to fall out
and ultimately in death.

The men who invented these new bombs say that
they will create the "on the beach syndrome", which is a lethal fall-out
that will kill every human being, on earth, within weeks.

It's up to
us. We -- I -- have to take the world on our shoulders and like
Atlas said, "I am responsible for the planet, for my children and
for the children of the world."